Thanks for the advice. Eventually I discovered that my LD_LIBRARY_PATH was not set and pidgin was loading the wrong libxml library file.
John
> Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:09:04 -0500
> From: khc at pidgin.im> To: johnlumby at hotmail.com> CC: support at pidgin.im> Subject: Re: more "Error reading blist.xml" (see also ticket #767)
>> On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 08:44:14PM -0500, John Lumby wrote:
> >
> > I am hitting this problem on one system where I built pidgin (2.5.3) and several other packages from source. My debug log shows that
> > . prefs.xml read ok (parsed by prefs itself)
> > . all of the other .xmls - fail with parsing error -e.g.
> > (18:28:03) util: Reading file accounts.xml from directory /home/lumby/.purple
> > (18:28:03) util: Error parsing file /home/lumby/.purple/accounts.xml. Renaming old file to accounts.xml~
> > (18:28:03) util: Writing file accounts.xml~ to directory /home/lumby/.purple
> > (18:28:03) util: Writing file /home/lumby/.purple/accounts.xml~
> > (18:28:03) util: Reading file status.xml from directory /home/lumby/.purple
> > (18:28:03) util: Error parsing file /home/lumby/.purple/status.xml. Renaming old file to status.xml~
> > (18:28:03) util: Writing file status.xml~ to directory /home/lumby/.purple
> > (18:28:03) util: Writing file /home/lumby/.purple/status.xml~
> > ...
> > (18:28:03) util: Reading file blist.xml from directory /home/lumby/.purple
> > (18:28:03) util: Error parsing file /home/lumby/.purple/blist.xml. Renaming old file to blist.xml~
> > (18:28:03) util: Writing file blist.xml~ to directory /home/lumby/.purple
> > (18:28:03) util: Writing file /home/lumby/.purple/blist.xml~
> >
> > and these are the ones parsed by the external XML parser.
> >
> > I am certain there are no strange characters or sequences in these files - because they were imported from another system where pidgin parses them successfully. I am guessing that there is something not configured/installed correctly somewhere down in the guts of the perl XML-parse and related perl modules, but what? The debug log does not include any messages from perl. I have tried re-installing with all the latest versions of "everything:" and still this. Every package configures successfully and installs successfully and pidgin configure says it is using libxml2 and XML:Parser. Nothing that I can see wrong. As mentioned in other bug reports, when I quit pidgin, it writes out all the files just as they were before, and on the next start it fails again. Very frustrating. This did not happen on pidgin 2.3.1 (the most recent one where it worked ok)
>> Have you tried to open it up manually using a text editor to confirm
> that the file is not otherwise corrupted? Pidgin uses libxml and the
> xml files have to be UTF-8 clean, so you may want to double check that
> this is the case.
>> -khc
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